Have we lost the name AI like we lost Hacker, Baud, and GIF?
A hacker was once a computer enthusiast, and the media made it into a name for criminals who break into other people's systems.
Decades ago, people started using baud when they meant BPS. Not many technical people back then, but it wasn't possible to correct the few who made the mistake. Even one top member of the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) said it's just “baud” now, no matter the real meaning.
(baud = symbols per second. A symbol can transport multiple bits, so a V.32 modem with 9600 bps worked at 2400 baud, 4 bits per symbol.)
GIF is an image format. Multiple frames stored in such a file can get played like a video. But today every video without sound gets called a GIF.
AI is an old term. But today most people say AI but only mean genAI.
It's even more absurd: There are gamers who demand computer games without AI. WTF?
AI was always part of computer games. Even the early computerized board games. I remember Half-Life fans loving the enemy AI. And I think one of the games in the Wolfenstein franchise had enemies that found cover when shot at. That's normal, old AI. Not genAI.
If AI is really lost, how do we discuss the thing that was once considered AI?
128 replies
"Lost?"
None of those terms have been lost. They've just come to have a wider definition than before. Language evolves over time as people are exposed to new ideas, words, or terms. As non-technical people begin using the terms, the meaning has an understood meaning to the public that most people use (e.g. AI/genAI), and a technical definition that is still understood by those it is relevant to. It just requires context.
Yes, words have meaning- but words also change over time as the public understanding shifts. Just like the word "literally." It used to mean something that is/should be interpreted exactly as it is said/written/shown. Now "literally" also means "figuratively," even within the dictionary.
So, no. It isn't lost, you just need to give context about what form of "AI" you are referring to.
That's literally true... Like in the literal sense... STOP WINKING AT ME!
"Literally" is used as a superlative. The "literally means figuratively" thing tends to refer exaggerations. "I'm literally dying" or "That's literally hotter than the sun".
It's a stand in for "really" which has a double meaning
But yes, we never "lost" the word. Some online grammar pedants simply refused to accept it as a homonym.
Because both meanings are opposites, literally is a more specialized form of homonym called a contronym. Unlike a contronym such as clip where it’s to tell whether the speaker is talking about clipping things together or clipping stuff off of something based on their use in a sentence, literally and figuratively fit into any sentence the same way. In any case where the speaker’s words could be interpreted ambiguously to be literal or figurative and they add literally to clarify they can’t because someone could mistake their literal literally meaning to be a figurative one.
That means the literal use of literally is functionally lost, and for what? So folks have another way to exaggerate? I don’t care if a language evolves, but if it’s going to I think it should evolve in such a way that expressing certain ideas isn’t lost, especially if there isn’t anything real to be gained. I literally don’t understand why people are so gun-ho to defend using literally figuratively.
"really" -> "extremely" is not the opposite of "really" -> "factually".
It isn't functionally lost any more than "really" has become functionally lost. It's contingent on context.
"It's really hot outside" and "He's really the murderer" have two very coherent and distinct interpretations.
In the same vein, "It's literally as hot as the sun out here" and "This Christian extremists are taking the Bible too literally" have distinct and non-interchangeable meanings.
But the term has (ahem) LITERALLY been used as an intensifier since 1769. You're far too late to the party on this debate. It's LITERALLY been settled for centuries.
How can it literally be settled if people are still arguing about it? Unless you mean figuratively? Good to know people two and a half centuries ago could write poorly.
Same way people can wave a Confederate Flag 150 years after the war is over.
I didn't realize people had been shot for not using literally figuratively. Plus one could argue that people waving the Confederate flag 150 years later means the war wasn't fully finished, but I'm not here to debate politics.
I don't understand why you compare "literally" to "really". They're two different words that are used differently. I really don't have any problem with using really as an intensifier because it aligns just fine with using it to indicate fact. "It's really hot outside" -> "The heat outside is real." "He's really the murderer" -> "His being the murderer is real."
But using literally in your example adds absolutely nothing to the sentence. "It's literally as hot as the sun out here" and "It's as hot as the sun out here" convey the exact same meaning, except one has an extra word that degrades other uses of it. If your sentence could replace the word "literally" with the word "figuratively" and you would intend the same meaning, you should either use "figuratively" or nothing there at all. That way when the word literally is used there can be no doubt that you mean "in the literal sense."
Irregardless isn't even setting off spell checkers. "Without having lack of regard", fucking what?
Our language is evolving into useless shit, and I despise people who do not respect language and definitions. "Oh, language is evolving!"
Yeah, velociraptors evolved into chickens: how did that shit work out? /being facetious, before someone with poor language skills happens to be a paleontologist snaps back
You're fighting the tide. There's never been a point in time where language had fixed, immutable definitions. It's always been transient, no matter what you learned, and it's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just how communication and culture work.
I think it's valid to have a visceral hatred for contranyms.
I'm not saying you can't hate them, but I am saying that all you'll achieve by that is getting angry all the time.
I am pretty sure we came up with DEFINITIONS. Now what does that word mean?
I having been fighting a tide of idiocy my entire life, but it doesn't mean I will drown in it.
Definitions are found, not made. ;)
Objects are found. We define objects. Then we make words. This seems so simple and people seem to want to make it complex.
Eh, I've been learning about linguistics and it's changed my view on the topic.
"Inflammable" means flammable!
It would make more sense if it was written “enflammable”, similar to French.
But both forms are acceptable… meaning in French, you can have “ininflammable”!
Context is rarely given.
And the real meaning is important when the actual work has to be done.
“Allow users to upload and play GIFs.” And now I'm reading old specs from 1987 or try to use an existing GIF library. The boss is angry because he can't upload his silent movie.
“This site needs AI.” And now I'm happily pruning some trees for the perfect minimax implementation. The manager asks me how many tokens it will need, and I say 0. They become suspicious.
Context doesnt have to be given, it exists regardless of instructions ; it's your responsibility to infer and understand it, or ask questions if you feel like you're missing important info
If context isn't given, in a professional setting- then that is a failing on the person communicating. Again, your examples are cleared up with context. The meaning isn't gone, there is just more than one definition to those words now.
But there is a general definition. That's the point isn't it? Its a bit on the reader to get with that.
For example, if I say something about corn you should know what im talking about immediately. I shouldn't have to specify the yellow vegetable also called maize just because a thousand years ago the word meant something else.
Did you fail to read the thread, or do you actually think you said anything that has bearing on the conversation?
I'm gonna reuse an old comment here
It's certainly been tarnished by LLM-bros coopting the term for marketing/grifting purposes
“Crypto” is the big one for me, always was cryptography but yah, that one has been taken over by the shitcoins now…sigh.
Damn, I almost forgot about crypto. My tired brain tried to protect me. But this word is up in the big league of lost words.
Indeed it is sadly…
The term "artificial intelligence" was first used in the 50s, so video game AI wasn't the original meaning either. Arguably neither video game AI nor machine learning AI are proper AI, but the term has always been very malleable. I don't think the other meanings are lost. If you say "the enemies in this game have bad AI", people aren't going to think that you mean LLMs.
People are stupid. They will. Give it time.
Here is a video about a combat robot team using various algorithms to assist with driving. It includes the following:
The ai techbros won. We're already here.
‘AI’ has been a marketing term since it was conjured in 1956, nothing of value has been lost in it being assimilated by a grift.
Lost as in the definition has changed and it isn't going back so just get used to it, yes. That's how language works.
I work in crypto. No, not "cryptocurrency".
That's the fun part - you don't! In the absolutist landscape of social media it's impossible to discuss subjects where every comment is reduced to which of two polar opposite sides you are on. Either you hate capitalism or hate socialism. Either you are pro-AI and all the evils anyone has ever associated with it, or you're a tech-bro who wants to ruin the environment building datacenters. Many subjects in online discussions have reached the "Why bother?" stage.
I'm still trying to figure out when "bucket list" came to mean a todo list with a deadline rather than a list of things to do before you die.
figure it out should be on your bucket list
From the employer's perspective, there is no difference.
It is usually one person not fully understanding the meaning, using it wrong and no one correcting them. I know a guy that does it all the time, and then he says "you know what I meant". No, I did not!
That’s not at all what a bucket list is
edit: unclear, my meaning was “a random todo list with a date is not a ‘bucket list’” - to me a bucket list is a list of things to do before you die
That is exactly what a bucket list is. It's a list of things you want to do before you "kick the bucket".
Correct, we are in agreement. Sorry, my comments intent was “a bucket list is not a dated todo list”
u/CallMeAI already described two interpretations, which is the 3rd you're proposing?
how about a list of buckets?
I think I saw a TikTok talking about it. It was first mentioned in a movie. I am not sure if it is from this or from the last century. But less than 40 years.
no one says Baud, that one is up for grabs
Baud.
I'm doing my part by only calling it machine learning or LLMs. I do my best to avoid calling it AI
Well it is AI, it's just not all AI
I know, but I need to make a specific point to my managers and coworkers that LLMs are statistical guessing machines
Isnt using machine learning as bad? LLMs dont include image, sound, animation generation as far as i know
Generative AI or genAI seems like the best term to use
Now think about "theory": the popular meaning¹ and the original meaning, the one used in science².
¹ "it's just an idea"
² "it is proven beyond doubt with the current knowledge"
Many people who know the difference between theory and hypothesis say hypothesis when they mean hypothesis.
Lol, no they don't. Because outside of a scientific setting- the words are synonyms. Listed as such within any modern dictionary or thesaurus. Just because YOU have a narrow understanding of a word, doesn't make its use outside of that scope wrong.
"the·o·ry /ˈTHirē/ noun noun: theory; plural noun: theories
a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained."
"hy·poth·e·sis /hīˈpäTHəsəs/ noun noun: hypothesis; plural noun: hypotheses
a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation."
They don't want genAI slop for visuals, writing, and other creative things in games. They are using AI in the context of those things and even give examples about how AI upscaling of textures in game design looks shitty and don't want voice actors to be replaced with fake voices. They still want human creative involvement front and center because all the llm/genai image stuff is just ripping off existing stuff in the worst ways.
They aren't talking about pathing or gameplay ai that has been around forever because the term AI has been coopted by genAI and that is what they are referring to.
That was OP's whole point
Then why would it be absurd for gamers to demand games without AI if the gamers don't literally mean the older types of AI?
Because AI used to mean the older types of AI. It's an example how the meaning of AI changed which OP is complaining about.
In video games, (enemy) AI can mean a pathfinding algorithm and a couple rules regarding the distance to the player
OP is very much aware of this. You missed their point.
Whoosh
"Hacker" and "AI" are words made mostly useless by widespread misunderstandings about what they mean. "Baud" and "GIF" are words made more useful by people not caring about the technical details of what they used to mean.
That does not make it impossible to say things about hackers or AI. If you've got something substantial to say on either topic it's not that hard to make it clear in context that you're using the word in an unusually correct way.
The short answer is probably yes.
Maybe it's a quote I read somewhere, but basically everybody agrees that language changes over time, but nobody wants to admit that it changes during their lifetime. I think the only thing to do, rather than campaign for or against one form or another, is to do what you've already been doing and make yourself understood given the context of the situation.
In terms of technical accuracy, new variables have been introduced that are--through no fault of your own--making you less understandable. I think, though, that it still falls to you to make yourself understood, either by brute force and using your definitions regardless, or by being more descriptive.
The hill I'm willing to die on is that "cyber" is short for cybersex, not cybersecurity or cyberspace as appropriated by the military.
This is a prefix I only heard the last few years, and I have no idea who started it. Everything with cyber has almost nothing to do with cybernetics.
It sounds so fake.
care to elaborate?
If you know, you know.
¯\(ツ)/¯
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got short arms... no need to mock me 😥
I read this as the name Al. Fonts are tricky.
But yes, my hermes agent is named AI Gore.
We called your kind of AI game theory.
The current kind was just artificial neural networks.
Don’t worry: it will be “Super Intelligence“ now.
There's a German (kids') story about someone who was renaming everything. He called the table a chair. But he then had to give the chair a new name.
Trump forgot to give the former superintelligence a new name.
Yes, we have.
I remember how everyone talked about how the first Half-Life game implemented AI so well. The enemies were actually cunning, especially by the standards of the time; One enemy grunt would chase you into cover and have another grunt throw a grenade, while a third one circled around.
If a game today was released with a rumor of having "great AI implementation", a lot of people would understandably steer clear.
I had this happen with 3D (as in computer graphics, 3D animation...) when films started releasing in stereo. Fortunately it's mostly a thing of the past now
My personal pet peeve on this stuff is the word algorithm. Talk about a word that means something completely different to technical folks than non-technical.
The definition of algorithm is any well defined step by step procedure to solve a problem. To the nontechnical it means specifically an algorithm used by social media to rank and recommend things. Makes reading about social media incredibly eye rolling
Take advantage of yet another communication hook that the old internet gave us: word tagging.
You can for example request comments on 90s!AI or you can ask someone to convert a image!GIF for you.
Sorry, I wasn't online before 1988.
Awww, you missed out on the
C:\DOS\RUNtimes!Yes, in 1988, I used an Amiga 500 to go online. Wrote and ran my own BBS on it in 1989. Switched to Linux on PC in 1995, after booting into NetBSD a few times on an Amiga 3000.
Haha. Language, culture and society, golly all I can say is, sometimes it do be like that...
Ideally, AI is the larger umbrella term for just about anything. It should not be the term used when speaking critically of a specific kind of AI: NPC AI, TTS (text to speech), STT (speech to text), ML models for vision, GenAI (LLMs, image generators, audio generators, video generators) etc.
When speaking critically, most people do mean "GenAI" and that should be the distinction.
"GIF" as in giraffe, btw.
You forgot the biggest pronunciation hijack of the century.
If the inventor of .GIF was a linguist, maybe we would have used his suggestion. .GIF is a file format. JIF is a peanut-butter.
Gerraffe it is.
Some words that begin in gi have a j sound and some have a g sound. There’s no rule. English just be like that.
There’s giraffe and there’s girl.
There’s gibberish and there’s gibbon.
There’s gigantic and there’s gigabyte.
There’s ginger and there’s gingham.
The whole debate on GIF is dumb. Both pronunciations are acceptable. I would say it like gift personally, but there’s no reason to think that gif- has to sound like g vs j. There’s just no rule for it in English.
It's one of the few playful arguments left in this world, I think. If there is one that can still be had online, it's probably this one.
To be honest, I pronounce gif like "gif" or "gif" depending on my mood.
While my personal bias is in the creators favor, it doesn't seem to me that GIF is even a proper word to begin with. It's an abbreviation and a format extension. As such, there aren't any rules that should be applied even if there were rules that could.
File extensions have such a wide variety of pronunciations it makes "gif" irrelevant anyway. (Is it E-X-E or is it "ex-ee"?)
I've always disliked these short and sweet justifications for one pronunciation over another as there's a million justifications that can go either way.
Here's an arguably more more apt example considering it contains every letter from the original acronym: "GIF" as in gift.
In my opinion, go with the one the causes less confusion. There's already a brand using the "JIF" pronunciation and nothing else using the "GIF" pronunciation so I prefer the hard G pronunciation.
The developers of PNG at least documented the pronunciation right from the start: ping
I still call it P N G
I always preface it with Generative AI if I am going to use it
I work in the games industry and AI is already widely in use for NPC behaviour
Baud comes from Baudot code. The things I learned getting a HAM license.
Just say I'm getting old and can't cope next time
I miss leetspeak personally
It might change with the next AI winter.
Also, the old "AI" was already a bit of a stretch from "artificial intelligence".
In the meantime, I'll probably refer to the old AI as "enemy controller", at least in the code.
When I started learning the programming language Common Lisp, I thought there was only one AI winter. That's all the Lisp bros were talking about and how awesome the Lisp machine was.
But recently I'm wishing for a new one and looked it up on Wikipedia: there were already several AI winters.
The next one will be the AI winter for the next decades.
This reminds me of the same naming treatment that telephones got, once something else got called a phone
Well one thing we can do is tell the fuckwits who want computer games without AI to learn literally anything about the subject.
We could use terms like "predictive systems" or "expert systems" or "monster control systems", but they're all more specific. I say we keep using the term AI when talking about the field in general and when someone complains tell them to stop talking nonsense, and then keep using the correct term.
Didn't baud = bps since we send 8bit "words" so for all of intents and purposes (except 40 year old gear) it's kind of correct?
Who uses baud nowadays though?!
How do we discuss anything when different people mean different things but use the same words? We all have weird perceptions of scale. Ask an american how far away 'far away' is. Then ask a European. Ask someone how they define 'smart.' Then ask someone who fits the first one's definition. You can get probably a dozen definitions each for words like 'friend,' 'trans,' 'fascist,' 'appropriate for children,' or just 'child.' Some people are dedicated to precision of language but society is full of people who say 'It was bluh,' because they either cannot, or just as often will not, put in the mental effort to find the words to express what they mean. Add in how most people don't have the time/bandwidth to learn what AI is, (or LLM, or genAI, or agentic, or neural networks, or conditionals, or statistical modeling, or anything else) but still want to feel like they do, so they map 'AI' onto some pre-existing concept in their head so they don't have to learn a new word.
Well, the term hack has been around a lot longer than computers. Its past meaning is just no longer valid. I was watching the old tv show The Odd Couple, Felix's daughter said she just wanted to hack around, Felix had to ask what she meant. While she really couldnt explain, "you know dad, just, like, hack around", which in this sense seems to mean doing nothing in particular. Saying "I couldn't hack it" has a double meaning these days.
I think you're referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and super intelligence (SI) or artificial super intelligence (ASI). Both were coined many years ago (~30) to differentiate from AI, which was already being used for much more than the original definition (which was meant to be AGI, or even ASI.)
For all three, GIF, hacker, AI, you just have to accept that language is fluid. Words are co-opted from other places all the time to describe new things. And to be honest, all of those terms have been used for meanings outside their original one for almost as long as they've existed, especially on the scale of human language.
I used to lament the term "drone" being used for remote control quadcopters... But the world won, so I have to stop being a nerd about it, and accept that it has a broader meaning now.
And just to note, people don't just mean genAI when they say AI now. They use AI for everything. You wrote a program to track workouts in a database? Better call it... "AI!"
I'll still call them UAVs.
But I don't think the original definition of AI was AGI... can you say more?
AI was coined in the 50's and was broadly meant to be "a computer that can behave like a human" in terms of reasoning, and self-improvement. It kind of put a name to what Alan Turing was working on with the Imitation Game/Turing Test, which he hinted would require a "learning" aspect.
In Sci-Fi, and generally in computer science, that was what was meant by AI for a long time, maybe with Sci-Fi taking it further into the super intelligence realm (e.g. in Neuromancer), until people started applying the term to smaller research items like math problem solvers, expert systems, machine learning, computer speech and recognition. Once that became more prevalent, AGI was coined.
I don't think that's accurate. The earliest AI conferences (in the 50s) were taken up with programs, algorithms and ideas which, today, look incredibly primitive - solvers which could (very slowly, and not practically for anything interesting) solve logic problems if they were posed appropriately. Like a really shit version of a SAT-solver.
Turing wrote that a machine which passed the Turing Test could reasonably be described as a thinking thing. LLMs from several years ago (and in fact, models from years before that) could pass the Turing test, so they are very much the kind of thing he was talking about - yet they are certainly not AGI. As part of his discussion of this, he addressed several possible gaps, including about learning, meaning that something which convincingly passes the Turing test would also, to him, demonstrate some ability to learn.
Early on, "artificial intelligence" was used to describe what we now call AGI, but it was also used to describe all sorts of problems which, at the time, were only soluble by intelligent people - such as machine translation, image recognition, or finding an efficient path through a maze.
Sorry. From your question, I didn't know you were an expert on CS/AI history. I defer to your wondrous knowledge on the subject to nitpick at what you baited me into talking about in detail.
Sorry I just didn't want to launch into what I already believed if you were talking about something different than what I thought.
to be fair hackers could be all kinds of electronics and tech and depending what they are doing could also be called crackers or phreakers or such.
Yes
I guess people don’t know ASI is a thing.
I have to explain to people that, yes, my paper was on AI but on a VERY specific one testing a specific use case of an ai trained to find cancer cells left over from surgery. Its not at ALL like the LLMs we are looking at now.
They also think mire GPUs and RAM ate going to make LLMs behave better haha. Its so funny what layman and industry thinks.
“guys” now means “all yall”
That's not new. I think that usage has been around since the 80s or 90s.
Can confirm. Grew up in the 80s/90s.
That's mostly due to Chunk and Sloth
I'm not sure you're realizing the difference between enemy AI and generative art AI.
A Citroën 2CV, BMW Z3, and Ford Model T are all cars.
But now when someone says “car”, everyone assumes it's a Citroën 2CV.
This is the crazy world of “all AI is genAI”.
I just act like Randal when someone says I "can't say that" or use "that word" anymore.
The term AI will evolve again because LLMs are just a temporary storm in a tea cup. Other forms of AI will come to the fore again and muddy the water.
I've always thought of AI purely as true "general AI", and think the term was misused before to describe complex algorithms etc. This is just the current phase of the misuse of the term AI.
Don't you mean SI?
You did it to yourselves by overreacting.